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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Students engaged in cutting edge, grassroots advocacy

Continuing the theme from yesterday, today I feature the
work of another group of former students, in this case Nicole Cortés and
Jessica Mayo of The Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project (MICA
Project). The MICA Project is a
community organization committed to working with low-income immigrants to
overcome barriers to justice. The MICA Project utilizes legal services,
organizing, advocacy, and education to promote the voice and human dignity of
immigrant communities.

Engaging with low-income communities, and in particular
immigrant communities, requires more than simply filling out and filing
documents. As the MICA Project
recognizes, there are a range of advocacy skills, both traditional and
non-traditional, required to help low-income and socially vulnerable clients
negotiate their way through difficult personal crises made harder by
bureaucracy and language difficulties.

One feature of the MICA Project I find particularly
interesting is that Nicole (along with a bunch of the students I taught in her
Race Relations Law class) is a joint JD/MSW student. The MICA Project’s emphasis on the cutting
edge of legal representation through holistic and interdisciplinary approaches,
and through legal and non-legal advocacy, is a core component of contemporary
approaches to advocacy on behalf of the poor.
A central feature of their work is building “a comprehensive network of
service providers” to help ameliorate their client’s myriad issues.

Many of these skills are not unique to the problem of
immigrant communities: this style of interdisciplinary representation is at the
core the holistic representation of indigent, addicted, mentally ill, and
otherwise at-risk clients.

As I did yesterday, I thought I’d let Nicole Cortés of the
MICA Project describe who they are and what they do in her own words:

The MICA Project was founded in 2011 by law students Nicole Cortés and Jessica
Mayo. The MICA Project addresses unmet need in immigrant communities by
utilizing an innovative combination of strategies to promote the voice and
dignity of immigrants. First, the MICA Project provides outreach to
immigrant communities, including educational presentations, focus groups, and
trainings. This helps to address the surplus need in immigrant
communities by taking a proactive approach, providing immigrants with the
information and resources they need before legal issues arise. Second,
the MICA Project provides client-centered legal representation to immigrants
who need an attorney for issues related to their immigration status.
Finally, the MICA Project utilizes a comprehensive social service network with
which it addresses immigrants’ needs that fall outside the area of legal
services.

Jessica and I both had been committed to and passionate
about serving the immigrant community and came to law school with this
motivation. Through our work in the nonprofit immigration field, we
observed a surplus need for legal services that the existing nonprofits were
unable to meet. People were turned away because of their
income level (e.g. working poor or lower middle class), geographic location
(across the river in Illinois), or legal status. We felt there was a
niche to be filled and formed the MICA Project in response to that.

We started by confirming with the existing providers what
our impressions were about need. With their support, we came in as a
collaborator rather than a competitor. We had both taken a
"Nonprofit Planning and Drafting" course in law school and worked
with that professor and other mentors to incorporate as a nonprofit. After
that, we dedicated our last year of grad school to working on our business plan
and fundraising to make the project a reality.

Jessica and I both came to law school with a passion-- to
work WITH people who seek justice. Therefore, in regards to coursework,
the really helpful parts of law school were those courses that fueled that
passion. Our Civil Rights and Community Justice clinic experience, Race
Relations Law, and Critical Jurisprudence are a few examples of the kinds of
classes that strengthened our commitment to the ideals behind the MICA Project
and ultimately made us better prepared to confront issues of injustice in the
real world. The conversations we had in those classes helped us connect
with like-minded peers and explore possibilities for social change through the
practice of law.

Although the MICA Project charges fees on a sliding-scale,
we do rely in part on grant funding to operate. Funding is something all
nonprofits must constantly think about and our project is no different.
We are in the process of seeking volunteers for grant-writing and other
fundraising efforts which will allow us to focus on legal and community work.

Comments

As a student and a frequent reader of prawfsblawg, I really appreciate this series. It is fantastic and inspiring to see what law students and recent graduates are doing with their degrees. Thank you, and best of luck to the students you have posted about already and (hopefully!) will post about in the future.